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Creating a Wedding Budget You Can Afford

I hope last post’s tips help you save some cash in your wedding planning! This week I am going to get down to the nitty gritty of how I came up with my budget since I took a different route when calculating it.

Since I don’t have the $25,000 to spend on my wedding like the average, I started by figuring out how much I had to work with. Since we are pretty much paying for our wedding ourselves and I didn’t have a wedding savings account full of cash, I decided making said savings account would be a good start. After creating the account I looked at my regular monthly budget and figured out how much I could afford to put into it each month. Once I had all that figured out I had some hard numbers to work with.

Now this budget gave me a total number that I would have saved by the wedding date we picked, but that doesn’t help much since I only have access to a fraction of the total each month.

My solution!

I flipped over my Wedding Planning Timeline and wrote what amounts would be in the fund in each corresponding month. Mind blowing right!?

Next I went through and found all the things I would need to pay for in what month and put them on the backside. This gave me a good idea of how spread out my purchases are. Then I estimated my big ticket items (based on what I would have), subtracted those amounts, and then recalculated what I would have each month. Then I did the same thing with lower cost items. I had to do some rearranging to make sure I had enough money when each of the purchases was scheduled to come up, but I made everything fit.

This systems worked great for me because it made sure I stayed on the budget that I know I can afford and won’t go into debt for a party. It also helps keep me in check because I can visually see what would happen if I made a bad fiscal decision.

For example if I go over budget on the centerpieces in May I won’t have enough money by August to pay for my invites. If the invites go out late because I had to save up more money, then the timeline gets thrown off and I have a panic attack and die!!!

Okay maybe not exactly like that, but you get the idea!

This plan is a “Work with what you’ve got” strategy instead of struggling to afford things I think I need.